And another one bites the dust…
For a long time it looked like airlines in Europe were invincible, with barely any airlines going out of business. Now we’ve seen a series of airlines in Europe face financial hardships over the past year plus, which was really started by airberlin ceasing operations, though has really gotten worse over the past several months.
Germania is the latest airline to go out of business, as they ceased operations overnight. Here’s what Germania’s CEO had to say about the airline going out of business:
“Unfortunately, we were ultimately unable to bring our financing efforts to cover a short-term liquidity need to a positive conclusion. We very much regret that consequently, our only option was to file for insolvency. It is of course the impact that this step will have on our employees that we regret the most. All of them as a team always did their best to secure reliable and stable operations — even in the stressful weeks behind us. I would like to thank all of them from the bottom of my heart. I apologise to our passengers who now cannot take their Germania flights as planned.”
The airline says that their short-term liquidity needs emerged due to “unforeseeable events” such as “massive increases in fuel prices last summer and the simultaneous weakening of the euro against the US dollar, considerable delays in phasing in aircraft into the fleet and an unusually high number of maintenance events that the airline’s aircraft required.”
For those of you not familiar with Germania, they’re a German airline that has been in business for over 40 years. Initially they operated charter flights, but in recent years they also operated scheduled flights. The airline had a fleet of 30 Airbus and Boeing narrowbody aircraft, and last year transported more than four million passengers.
Last month there were signs of the airline being in trouble. On January 8, 2019, Germania announced that they were examining various financing options to meet their short-term needs. They said that it was business as usual for now, but obviously that didn’t last long. Then last week the airline announced they couldn’t pay their employees anymore, so the writing was on the wall here.
This is of course incredibly unfortunate for both employees and passengers who were booked to fly with the airline.
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